In disaster recovery solutions where there are storage management servers involved, it is necessary to provide a high availability (HA) solution so the user can use different storage management servers to control their storage devices for data replication.
In a HA environment, it is necessary for two or more storage management servers, e.g., IBM TotalStorage® Productivity Center for Replication (TPC-R), to communicate with each other to synchronize and maintain consistency of data.
The problem arises when the connection link between the two or more storage management servers is dropped. As a result, the storage management servers will not be in sync with one another and the servers will not be aware of new operations initiated by a user or from internal events.
This will become a problem when both storage management servers have connections to the storage devices as they are aware of actions of the alternate storage management server and such actions are interpreted as an error. Such errors will cause the data replication to suspend in certain cases which is not desirable as the users will not be protected against a disaster any longer.